Khashoggi’s murder must be condemned. But Saudi Arabia still serves U.S. interests.
The murder (if that’s what it was) of Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul, Turkey, was a horror in itself, and a greater horror still in what it threatens to unleash. The Muslim Brotherhood, Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the ayatollahs of Iran are huddled over the corpse, hoping to turn a political profit from the death of an innocent man.
Mr. Khashoggi was a thorn in the flesh of the hyperactive crown prince of Saudi Arabia, Mohammad Bin Salman, a man who faces a concatenation of problems the likes of which the House of Saud has rarely seen. Iran, hostile, arrogant and ambitious, has ruthlessly carved a “Shia crescent” from Baghdad through Damascus to Beirut. A gusher of American oil and natural gas has diminished OPEC. Turkey, sympathetic to the Muslim Brotherhood and harboring dreams of restoring its old Ottoman glory, seeks to displace Saudi Arabia as the voice of the Sunni world. Russia has reasserted itself in the region. And inside Saudi Arabia, a growing population with high expectations demands more opportunity and better governance from a traditional monarchy largely unprepared for the 21st century.
It was out of this turmoil and fear that the MBS phenomenon emerged. At home and abroad, the Saudis attempted a series of frenzied initiatives, including a war in Yemen and the privatization of Aramco, to improve their position. Meanwhile, MBS stroked gullible American elites into the belief that he was a democrat.
It worked for a while; gullibility is America’s most plentiful natural resource. But after Mr. Khashoggi’s death, even the most naive observer can see that the crown prince is at best a modernizing autocrat, using dictatorial power to drag his country into the future: Peter the Great, not Thomas Jefferson. At worst, he could end like Phaethon, the Greek demigod who lost control of his horses while foolishly trying to drive the chariot of the sun.
The Saudi transformation is not going smoothly. Aramco’s privatization has been delayed and the ambitious Vision 2030 goals for economic renewal seem increasingly elusive. MBS’s foreign policy looks more chaotic than inspired, and the blunder in Istanbul was not the first false step. The arrest of Lebanese Prime Minister Saad Hariri last year and the failed diplomatic standoff with Qatar were not the strokes of a master. Nor is the kingdom’s ill-planned and poorly executed Syria strategy or its intervention in Yemen, which has created a humanitarian disaster without notably advancing Saudi interests.
The Khashoggi affair is more of the same. But more than other MBS-era blunders, this episode may be an existential threat to the international prestige he has been working assiduously to build—even as the Saudis appear to be cooking up an exculpatory cover story.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, flying to Riyadh at short notice to bring some order to the chaos, is well acquainted with the hard facts of the Middle East. He knows the crown prince’s Saudi Arabia is not an authoritarian caterpillar metamorphosing into a liberal butterfly. But neither are Turkey and Iran. And on crucial issues, U.S. and Saudi interests are aligned. The U.S. wants to ensure that no single power, inside or outside the Middle East, has control over the world’s oil spigot. That means Saudi Arabia must remain independent and secure.
There are two things the U.S. should not do. One is sweep Mr. Khashoggi’s murder under the rug. His disappearance has damaged Saudi Arabia’s standing, including in Congress. Mr. Pompeo needs to deliver a clear message that this behavior weakens and ultimately endangers the alliance. He should not be deterred by Saudi threats. Like the American Confederates who overestimated the power of King Cotton in the 1860s, the Saudis tend to overestimate King Oil’s power today.
But to do what the Iran-deal chorus and the Erdogan and Muslim Brotherhood apologists want—to dissolve the U.S.-Saudi alliance in a frenzy of righteousness—would be an absurd overreaction that plays into the hands of America’s enemies. It could also stampede the Saudis into even more recklessness. France was not expelled from the European Community or NATO in 1985 when its agents sank the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, killing an innocent man in the process.
Without lionizing, ostracizing or enabling MBS, Mr. Pompeo needs to get to the heart of the matter: Saudi insecurity. To restore balance and sobriety to its foreign policy, Saudi Arabia needs to calm down, and only the U.S. can provide the assurances to make that possible. Among other things, this entails coordinating with the Saudis (and the Israelis) on a policy aimed at containing Iran and stabilizing the region. It also involves encouraging the economic transformation the Saudis seek at home. Even as he responds with appropriate gravity to a serious provocation, Mr. Pompeo must give Saudi authorities the confidence that sober and sensible policies will bring continuing American support for the kingdom’s independence and reform.
@ Bear Klein:
BEAR…!!! You spoiled my beautifully constructed analogy….It was just ready to topple further earthward. The Dems have turned out to be pure….. I mean pure drek, even the Jewish pinheads. .
@ Edgar G.:
Phony high ground would have been a better way to say it. Hypocrisy would also work!
@ Bear Klein:
Bear…all 100%, except mentioning the Dems in conjunction with “The High (moral) Ground”..
Your research on Kashoggi show that he was a very bad man and I don’t understand all the furore about his death, He didn’t deserve to live –a guy like that, who must have caused directly or indirectly the deaths of hundreds of innocents..
But putting te Dems on a High ground…..THAT, is an error, not a bad one. We could say that the very top of a huge mound of filthy garbage is also “high ground” and that is the only high ground I’d concede to the Dems…
https://pjmedia.com/spengler/german-press-reveals-saudi-spook-saga-behind-khashoggi-disappearance/?fbclid=IwAR0fYqcA1Aa96H0BrKBIEdiDopyzB4KKseaXrhlA9CcNi0YEdnQrqRkak5A
If the USA wants to contain or hurt Iran, if the USA wants to contain Hezbollah, if you want Israel to get along better with the Arab World then you will need the help of Saudi Arabia.
The unrealistic say you need to punish evil doers. Then you need not talk to any Arabs in the middle east because you are going to be dealing with bad guys. The bad guys you deal with are also the enemy of your enemy.
If you want your enemies to win you will get to an unrealistic moral high-ground. This fits many USA neo-cons and Democrats.
No one seems to have considered the very real possibility that it was Erdogan, not Crown Prince Mohammed of Saudi Arabia, who had Kashoggi murdered. But if you look at the circumstances carefully, this is a very real possibility.
The apparent murder of Kashoggi would have made so little sense for Saudi Arabia to have done it, at least in the place where it occurred and the manner in which (according to the Turkish government) it occurred, that I suspect that the Turks, not the Saudis, murdered him. While the Saudis would have risked everything and gained nothing from murdering Kashoggi, or even attempting to kidnap him, in their own consulate in a hostile foreign country, where surely they must have known their consulates were kept under constant surveillance, the Turks had something to gain by murdering Kashoggi and then blaming it on their Saudi rivals. Prince Mohammed bin Sultan (known as MBS), was an enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas, and Qatar, all of which are strongly supported by the Erdogan regime. What better way to discredit the Saudis, reduce their influence, and bring about the dismissal of their chief Saudi enemy (MBS), than committing a murder of a high-profile individual and then blaming it on the Saudis.
But would Erdogan really murder a personal friend and supporter like Kashoggi to accomplish his purpose? I believe that his record shows he is ruthless enough to sacrifice anyone to achieve his political goals.He has had thousands of people put to death since the failed coup against him two years ago. Any many Turks suspect that he engineered the coup himself in order to provide a pretext for the subsequent massive purge.
It is very possible that Kashoggi was continuing to report to SaudiI Arabia’s intelligence agency, as he is known to have done in the past, in spite of his public criticisms of MBS.In fact, those criticisms would have provided Kashoggi with excellent cover for worming his way into Erdogan’s confidence and inner circle-which in fact Kashoggi did.
If Erdogan had discovered that his supposed friend Kashoggi was spying on him for the Saudis,he wouldn’t have hesited for a moment to have Kashoggi killed, and then blame it on the Saudis.
Edgar,
I agree with all you said — even about the Confederates. Just how Mead thought it appropriate to compare Saudi Arabia to King Cotton is beyond me. I see that he also invokes the names of Peter the Great, Thomas Jefferson and Phaethon, before zeroing in on the deeply relevant (not) French sinking of a Greenpeace ship.
Is there a point to any of this? Neither Mead nor anyone else, save perhaps a few dozen Saudi and Turkish officials, knows what went on at the consulate
The very first sentence of this article was pure………. How is it worse-as a deed- than the thousands of murders of completely —UNINVOLVED in poltics–innocent Jewish victims of Arab murderers many funded by Saudia….don’t equally horrific slaughters occur almost every day right under our noses. Have we any knowledge that the Saudis have ordered their proxies to lay off Israel……
The reason that the Kingdom is modernisng today has much to do with the realisation that “King Oil is no longer THE king, but being rapidly demoted to a prince, or even Duke….
::As a side note ****The Confederates did not expect that King Cotton would rule the roost..that was the boast of some inebriated loudmouths, and ignorant plantation owners, but never that of the government or level headed Southerners. THEY knew that had a hard slogging fight of 4 million whites against 27 million Northerners who held all the economic and technological advantages an established army, many military foundries, (the south has ONE only) a strong navy, as well as international recogniton that the South lacked ****
It was an egregious mistake, like those of many countries with lack of political expertise and they should have taken the path that Israel always takes.. “That it is not aware of the circumstances and will investigate, and make a statement in due course..” … This would have made a cool-off period, and given them time to produce maybe “an affidavit from his doctor that he had a weak heart and succumbed from the shock of being arrested”…. or something a lot better than the weak admission now on record.